I am an author, ecologist, filmmaker, and President of the Dancing Star Foundation (www.dancingstarfoundation.org) from which some of my recent non-fiction works (with Jane Gray Morrison) are available, including: Sanctuary: Global Oases of Innocence (Foreword by the 4th Queen of Bhutan); God's Country: The New Zealand Factor (Preface by PETA's President, Ingrid Newkirk), and Donkey: The Mystique of Equus Asinus.
As for my fiction, recent works are available from Zorba Press (http://zorbapress.com/?page_id=90).
My most intense and sweeping novel is the 1836-page illustrated ecological epic - a work of 25 years and research in over 80 countries - The Adventures of Mr. Marigold, available in hardback and e-book.

3/02/2011 @ 2:43AM1,549 views

Just When You Thought You Could Bank On It

I’m sitting with my friends William Shatner and his wife Liz having tea and discussing wildlife. Bill and I have been having an ongoing dialogue about the fate of the earth for over twenty years, a conversation that started in earnest beneath Mount Everest where he insisted on doing his own climbing stunts at about 19,000 feet for a television series we made together (“Voice of the Planet”.)

William Shatner and Friend

“We need to get more wolves into the wild,” he declares, mulling over the future for his kids and grandchildren.

Reintroduction of wolves, we both acknowledge, has been one of the most contentious of wildlife issues. But with over 2,000 Threatened and Endangered species (T&E’s) in North America wolves are iconic, just like the now extinct Passenger Pigeon was. We need to care about predators. They keep ecosystems healthy, without which, we’re all dead.

The number of T&Es is growing rapidly and this trend threatens to defuse our sense of urgency about the value of biology in general.

When Extinction Starts To Draw A Yawn

We’ve read the “Be Warned” headlines too many times. We’ve set our sights on Labradoodles, not Antarctic sea-pigs, Egyptian vultures or Borneo leopards. But as oil prices soar, and revolutions come and go, the value of threatened wildlife takes on increasingly dire dimensions. The 193 delegates to the Nagoya Summit in October 2010 for the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity journeyed to Japan in an effort to find ways to slow down the vast tragedy of extinctions occurring all around us.

Egyptian Vulure, Socotra/Yemen

Wish them luck. Polls among young people have shown they can recite hundreds of labels and brands – the latest cool gizmo – but know virtually nothing about other species. Kids need to get outdoors. They can’t learn this stuff just sitting, yawning in a classroom or before a computer.

There may be as many as 100 million species out there and at current trends we’re likely to lose as many as 50% of them by the end of this century. Not just species, whole populations – over 42,000 populations disappearing every day.

The Population Explosion

At current reproductive trends we nearly 7 billion human consumers could easily exceed the ten, even eleven billion benchmark by the 22nd century. Most demographers look to population stabilization at about 9.5 billion but they’re not the ones making most of the whoopee. Cutting off family planning assistance to the poor, which some politicians favor, would undermine a complex series of events in which demonstrative threats to the global environment are explicitly linked to consumer numbers.

Iberian Wolf, Portugal

Climate change and habitat loss are two of the most obvious symptoms of the human population explosion which, as with wildlife, diminishes the value of every individual.

Smaller families, higher per capita income, women in control of their personal destinies all translates into more healthy governance and fewer civil wars; a brighter future for all concerned. Greater wealth can also assist biodiversity. Nations like Brunei, Bhutan and Suriname, and now regional Quebec are all good examples of this ecological-economic marriage.

Ecology and Economics

Ecosystem services have been valued at more than $33 trillion per year. A single tree in eastern Ecuador might well host as many as 60,000 different species of insects. This Bug Factor (often excluded from tropical eco-lodge brochures), in fact, maintains healthy rain-forest, clean drinking water, effective pollinators, and exerts critical climate stabilization, among many other things.

Americans cannot afford a Marshall Plan for every threatened species and habitat around the world, although we should take pride in having created the world’s first national park, Yellowstone, in 1872, which has since become a template for more than 120,000 other protected regions across the planet.

The Value of a Person

It’s unlikely we’ll ever fully value nature unless we value one another. If you perished in India’s Bhopal disaster in 1984 the courts would find your economic posterity hovering at a value fixed around $300.

Mother and children in Eastern Bhutan

In July 2008 the United States Environmental Protection Agency lowered its estimate of the value of a human being from just over $8 million to slightly more than $7 million dollars, which is still more than double the average amount paid families of victims of 9/11.

But They’re Celebrating in Greenland

Shatner and I are wrapping up our conversation, and I’m thinking, “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” That’s because even the famed Spotted Owl in Oregon – thought to have recovered – now appears to be in serious decline, 20 years after its forest habitat in the Northwest was closed off to chain-saws. The culprit is possibly another, larger migrant owl species, the Barred (or Hoot) Owl, who used to prefer North America’s East Coast but is now showing up in the Northwest.

The environmental challenges –whether among wolves, people or owls – have gotten so complex that in Greenland, melting ice is a prelude to what some have been celebrating as the coming organic farming boom in a region that never imagined such a prospect, as Gerald Traufetter has discussed in Spiegel Online (08/30/2006.)

To anyone paying even mild attention, these complexities can lead to seasickness; the facts are both freaky and confusing and hint of Easter Island Syndrome, a human ailment that is taboo in most polite conversation. But the late historian Arnold Toynbee stayed home writing, not partying, and he pointed to 22 civilizations, not unlike the culture hundreds of years ago on Easter Island that rapaciously chopped down every tree, destroyed all native biodiversity, only to see its own human populations self-destruct.

Tree in Remote Tropical Andes

Happily, with help from the Chilean Forest Service, Easter Island is replanting native species and enjoying something of a renaissance.

I look at Bill who exhibits that “Boston Legal” final moment of reflection (the one typically accompanied by a cigar, but not today) and ask him if he thinks there’s still time to fix the world?

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Michael Tobias, with his usual grace and wit, has written wonderfully about serious issues without giving one a headache. I agree with Michael: we need to consider with compassion the world we live in. After all: we live within nature, it does not live in us – except in the mind and imagination of this superb contributor. Well done, Forbes! Michael Tobias is a splendid addition to your roster.

I say amen to this statement: “Kids need to get outdoors. They can’t learn this stuff just sitting, yawning in a classroom or before a computer.” Kids and adults both will do well to take a hard look at the world around them and not take for granted that it will all still be here in the future just as we see it now. Smiling ambiguously…

Beautifully written Michael! My heart breaks every time I hear the media ranting about the enormous problem of deer and mountain lions invading our space and they announce a ‘special’ hunting season to reduce the population. What they are ignoring is the fact that it is humans invading the space of those beautiful animals. I agree 100% with your phrase “It’s unlikely we’ll ever fully value nature unless we value one another.”

Ms Simpson, I totally agree with you. While the classroom is critical on so many levels, it is equally imperative that young hearts and minds are schooled from the earliest possible age on what John Muir called the great manuscript of nature, wherein every page, every sentence has a new magnificent lesson to impart; of beauty, solace, and that which builds in people comfort and reverence for Nature. Muir got it right. So can every kid, and every teacher.

Dear Cherirames, You make superb points. What I term the “Bambi versus Grandma” syndrome that afflicts every region of the planet where the human population is inexorably encroaching upon fast dwindling habitat for other species. Population versus population. Deer, of course, were here first. But the ultimate non-violent solution will has long emerged in the name of immuno-contraception (aka birth control) which the the USDA, the Humane Society of the United States and so many other groups have been researching and applying for years. We need to be non-violently pro-active in this arena. Thanks for your comments.

Michael asks if we can fix our planet. He knows we can when he says “a single tree…might well host as many as 60,000 different species of insects.” He just hopes we understand. Each time we make an assault on the earth for something – minerals, oil, water, soil, almost whatever – we need to nourish it back to life. Planting a suitable tree is just a speedy way to restore life and order. Sometimes, it takes more. Recently, we added warm water tubs in Siddhachalam, a 120-acre nature and meditation reserve of the Jains in north-western New Jersey, so that animals and birds could find water during our severe winter. And what a difference it made! Like an oasis in a desert. But even if empathy for all life was not on our minds, the obligation to restore and repair is obviously ours. We can do it. We will do it. We hope there are more Michael’s to remind us. Thank you Michael.

Jaipat Singh Jain President, Siddhachalam, Blairstown, NJ. Also,co-chair, Technology Transfer Working Group of Climate Change Initiative, New York City Bar

I am writing from Bhutan today, which has made a remarkable commitment to the preservation of biodiversity and indigenous culture. As Michael points out, the cost of such commitment is very high. It takes wisdom to make this kind of long-term investment, even though there is no “market value” for the value it creates.

If I could sit with Bill and smoke a cigar in one of those “Boston Legal” final moments of reflections and ponder if there’s indeed still time to fix the world, I’d bring up why man feels in control of the universe to begin with. Perhaps when we learn to be less arrogant and realize we are simply part of a balance we’ll get back on track.

Bravo for Michael Tobias for bringing up the taboo topic of the role overpopulation is playing in destroying our life-support systems. Combined with overconsumption by the rich, it is sawing off the limb we are all sitting on. Great that he also brought up the much neglected problem of population extinctions. It’s populations of other organisms that provide us with crucial ecosystem services. If we miraculously could preserve every remaining species as just one viable population there would be no further species extinction crisis, and every human being would soon be dead. We are losing species at several thousand times the “background rate” through geological time, as Earth enters the sixth great extinction crises, but the rate of population loss is likely an order of magnitude or more higher. It is a critical issue almost universally ignored in the popular press.

Dear Jaipat Jain, Siddhachalam is a remarkable sanctuary in New Jersey and the Jains have for millennia advocated one of the finest, pro-active examples anywhere in the world of sustainable empathy in a world where difficult choices are having to be exemplified moment by moment. The New York City Bar’s membership commitment to enriching environmental oversight is also an outstanding example of a teamwork to secure urban and rural habitat for both people and other species. Conservation is not possible without people; people are not possible without conservation. As Gov. Jerry Brown put it years ago, the `economy exists inside nature; nature does not exist inside the economy.’ Thank you for your kind and thoughtful reply.

Dear dkspitzer, Say “hello” to Bhutan for me. As one of the most progressive economic models at a national level, this eastern Himalayan nation – one of the newest democracies in the world – is up against a most challenging biological balancing act: climate change, which is melting the glaciers, water export values and the basic critical ecosystem of water to the country’s agriculture. Added to that, the onrush of modernity for a nation that was steeped in rare isolation for centuries but now looks to new forms of income generation, notably eco-tourism. Bhutan’s exemplary Gross National Happiness model (GNH) has had a profound impact on numerous systems for re-evaluating the true impact of the human ecological footprint; for capturing all those economic externalities ignored in many other conventional forms of depreciation (e.g., GNP). The Bhutanese have four pillars they look to, which include right livelihoods at the biocultural level and as a small country (roughly 630,000 people with a Mahayana Buddhist orientation) her demographics and ecological future have all the signs of regenerative sustainability. A fine example for so many other countries. Good luck there and thanks for writing.

Dear Paul, Thank you for your -as ever- outstanding comments. Needless to say, your book, The Population Bomb (1968) awakened global consciousness with respect to the issue Rev.Thomas Malthus first intoned in the late 18th century. You endured some criticism by those who preferred to ignore the human population crisis only to realize now that you were not only precisely correct but possibly even overly “conservative”(back in 1968) with respect to the several billion people that were soon to be added to Earth -more than a doubling of human numbers with all of their impact. You spelled it out quite succinctly with the IPAT equation (impact= population times affluence times technology [and levels of technology].) Your work on butterflies, populations going extinct, and natural capitalism, along with virtually every other significant biological issue of our times (including ethics in biology, and -with the late Carl Sagan, your work on nuclear winter) has been a great inspiration to all of us. I think your recent book, Humanity on a Tightrope (co-authored with Robert Ornstein)is a beautiful example of how we can make things turn round, working together as a species to rectify many of the maleffects of our runaway consumerism and indifference to the plight of all those cohabiting Earth with us. Thank you for writing.

Dear garygoltz, Mr. Shatner is, indeed, one of the world’s sharpest wits, and a true renaissance gentleman who is a deeply committed environmental advocate, philanthropist, equine lover and expert (as is his wife, Liz), and needless to say, a great human being and talent. I think he shares huge optimism with a global audience and in so doing reminds us of our humanity and our ability to get things right. Thank you for writing.

Dear bettinagray, It is indeed a cooperative challenge and this is the generation to get it right. They probably have said that in every generation. Think about the wars, the Black Plague, etc. But now, we have an instantaneous global view and it behooves Mother Earth for us to take quite seriously, expeditiously, and with wise, restrained engagement. Frankly, those of us who have the possibility of even communicating via fancy computers, and other tools of technology, have not the luxury of indulging too much of the “sadness”: we need to embrace the possibilities for positive change; examine every challenge with an eye towards solutions, and get them right, self-correct, as is done every day in science. It’ll happen. Every human being is a miracle. And a soul speaks when it is spoken too (I feel). Thanks for writing.

Thank you so much, Dr. Tobias, for your wide-ranging expertise, and your compassionate intelligence. When poor Pandora opened the jar, everything flew out into the Greek world and created chaos — but one thing alone remained at the bottom: Hope. I will be watching this column for more signs of hope, and for ideas about what actions we can take to save species, save our planet, and save ourselves.